INFERNO FESTIVAL 2018 – DAY 1

 Concert Reviews  4 Responses »
Apr 032018
 

 

(Andy Synn was fortunate to be in attendance at the 2018 edition of Inferno Festival in Oslo on March 29 – April 1, and files this report, which will be spread out in installments over the balance of this week.)

 

What to say about Inferno Festival that I haven’t said before?

From the venue(s) and the location, to the bands and the general organisation, it’s still one of my favourite festivals I’ve ever been to, and this year was a particularly good one for me.

Of course things didn’t get off to the best start, as my plane was delayed on the tarmac for almost two hours, meaning that, by the time I finally hopped off the plane, jumped on a train, and made my way into Oslo, I had missed the one part of the Inferno Music Conference, which I really wanted to attend.

Anyway… Continue reading »

KRODA: “SELBSTWELT”

 Album Reviews  6 Responses »
Apr 022018
 

 

It seems that more and more bands (though still a small number) have been springing their albums by surprise, with little advance notice and no preview tracks, and the Ukrainian powerhouse Kroda did that at midnight last night, launching a new album named Selbstwelt on Bandcamp (though I confess that I was given an opportunity to hear the album in advance of that release).

Selbstwelt (The Land of Selbst) is Kroda’s seventh full-length studio album and joins a discography that also includes EPs, live recordings, and compilations. It follows a live album, Kälte Aurora – Live In Lemberg II, and is the band’s first studio release since 2015’s Навій схрон (Navij Skhron) (reviewed here), which was a significant departure from most previous Kroda releases, consisting of six ghostly and chilling ambient-music tracks and three black metal songs (including an electrifying cover of a song by Kroda’s countrymen Nokturnal Mortum), each different from the others and all still different in some ways from the pulse of Kroda’s past music.

Selbstwelt can be understood as both a return to earlier times and as a culmnation up of the band’s career so far. In Kroda’s own words: Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): INISANS — “TRANSITION”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  2 Responses »
Apr 022018
 

 

When many of us think about Swedish metal of death, what often comes to mind first is rotten, old-skull, chain-sawing morbidity, a mix of lurching ghoulishness and juggernaut plundering. Inisans are from Sweden, and they play death metal, but their music is a kind of incinerating lunacy, a form of shocking and electrifying violence that tends to leave listeners bludgeoned black and blue and gasping for air.

Those tendencies are rampantly on display in their debut album Transition, which will be released by Blood Harvest Records on April 6. But you won’t have to wait until the 6th to find out just how explosive the album is, because we have a full stream for you today. Continue reading »

BARREN EARTH: “A COMPLEX OF CAGES”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Apr 022018
 

 

(The fourth album by Finland’s Barren Earth was releasd by Century Media on March 30, and TheMadIsraeli gives it a very positive review here.)

 

What IS metal exactly? Or rather, what is metal as expressed on a metaphysical level? I’ve always felt that metal is consistently the expression of the beauty, the angst, and maybe the anger that come with the nihilistic realities of life. This powerful music exists as a product of man’s attempts to transcend the complacent, but also to lash out at those who are comfortable with the mundane, or even worse, who seek to enslave or oppress others to maintain their mundane complacency and to satisfy their own whims. In a sense, life should ultimately be beautiful, and the truest anger and despair is directed at that which seeks to prevent, snuff out, or degrade that beauty however nebulous it may be.

Barren Earth have always been a band who’ve followed very intensely in the footsteps of one of my musical heroes, Dan Swanö. Their music is dedicated to a nihilistic fusion of past, present, and future metallic complexity and bite, ’70s progressive melodic ambitions, and a sense of despair and anger that seems timeless, future-bound forevermore. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): QUANTUM HIERARCHY — “NEUTRON BREED”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  5 Responses »
Mar 302018
 

 

Neutron Breed is so blindingly explosive, so uncaged in its dedication to sonic violence, and so eye-popping in the speed and technical precision of its execution that it has the capacity to suck the air from your lungs while it turbocharges your own pulse rate. Worry about breathing later… prepare now to give yourself over to a maniacally vicious death metal rocket ride.

Neutron Breed is the new EP by the Italian band Quantum Hierarchy, which is being released today by Everlasting Spew Records, and it’s our privilege to help spread the word through the premiere of a full music stream. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): ANTICOSMOS — “WATERS OF DISSOLUTION”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHADES OF BLACK  2 Responses »
Mar 302018
 

 

Like the vast majority of all grand estates and even medium-sized garden plots on the landscape of the internet, most sites that offer writings about metal are captives of the culture of clickbait. They are honey traps for lazy flitting bees, offering precious little intellectual sustenance of any lasting value, or even much fleeting value. They mainly just make the frenetic buzzing of their visitors grow louder, but no more coherent.

But there are exceptions. The extraordinarily ambitious essay by R.M. Temin published by Toilet Ov Hell a few days ago is one of those. For most of its considerable length, it is a history of transgressive music, mainly focused on metal. It takes Black Sabbath as its starting point (after first drawing connections to the Beat Generation and “hippie counterculture”) and charts the course straight through to the present. Its overarching theme has to do with the connections between metal and politics, and ultimately about the rise and persistence of far-right politics within certain sectors of extreme music. It’s title is: “Rock Against Anything: How Metal Became So Fucking Reactionary and What To Do About It“. Continue reading »

PRIMORDIAL: “EXILE AMONGST THE RUINS”

 Album Reviews  14 Responses »
Mar 282018
 

 

(On March 30th Metal Blade will release Primordial’s new album, and Andy Synn reviews it below.)

 

Success, or so they say, can be a double-edged sword. And, if the reviews I’ve seen thus far are any indication, this is something that Primordial are finally discovering with the release of their ninth album, Exile Amongst the Ruins.

On the one hand are those people who have seen fit to declare this album a “masterpiece”, a “superlative triumph”, a “stunning success”, before they’ve even properly heard it, content as they are to blindly believe that the Irish quintet can do no wrong, while on the other are those whose reaction to Exile… can perhaps best be summed up as “slightly unhinged”, castigating the album as a titanic disappointment because it fails, in their estimation, to live up to the extremely high standards of their very best work.

And, of course, since so much of today’s music press is dedicated to the pursuit of exaggeration and excess over clarity and nuance, these voices have been amplified to the point where you’d be forgiven for being convinced that this album is either the best thing ever written, or the absolute worst… and nothing in between.

But the truth, unsurprisingly, is more complicated than that. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): MYRHOLT — “MØRKETID”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Mar 272018
 

 

The Norwegian musician and vocalist Ole Alexander Myrholt has had a long and prolific career, one that began more than two decades ago and ranged across a multitude of groups and personal projects, but seemed to enter a hiatus around 2011 when his band Tremor was put on hold indefinitely. However, something changed when Myrholt stepped in to play drums for the Norwegian black metal band Mork in December 2016.

Since then, adopting the name Myrholt, he has been recording again, performing all instruments and vocals. Myrholt released a multitude of singles and two albums last year, as well as a two-track EP named Vinter earlier this month. And now a new EP entitled Mørketid has been readied for release, which we are happy to present it to you through a full stream of its five tracks. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): DEADLY CARNAGE — “THROUGH THE VOID, ABOVE THE STARS”

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule, Premieres  2 Responses »
Mar 262018
 

 

Space is still the final frontier. We gaze with our own eyes into the sparkled black vault of the night sky or peer more closely through telescopes, and there we see the undiscovered immensity of our past and the harbingers of our future looking back at us, producing a sense of wonder, awe, and perhaps fear.

Metal bands across a wide range of genres have taken the cosmos as their subject matter, and tried to express in different ways through their music the different perspectives and emotions spawned by consideration of the universe and our own tiny, fleeting place within it. Within that spectrum of sounds, Italy’s Deadly Carnage have take their own place with Through the Void, Above the Stars, a new album that will be released through A Sad Sadness Song on March 30. We present a full stream today, preceded by these thoughts about what they’ve created: Continue reading »

SLAVES BC: “LO, AND I AM BURNING”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Mar 262018
 

 

(Here’s Andy Synn’s review of the new album by Slaves BC from Pittsburgh, which was released digitally and on vinyl on March 16th.)

Those of you who have been following the site for a while may be aware that Death Mask, the third (and, ultimately, final) album by blackened metallic filthmongers Lord Mantis was one of my favourite releases of 2014, and remains one of my most listened to albums to this day.

But the acrimonious collapse of the line-up which gave birth to that record, followed a few years later by the sad passing of drummer Bill Bumgardner (and the subsequent final dissolution of the band) meant that any hopes of ever receiving a similarly scathing and spite-fuelled follow-up were dashed forever.

In the intervening years between then and now I’ve kept my eyes and ears open for a band/album capable of hitting that same sick spot (with Phantom Winter coming closest), but had never found anyone capable of sending that same sadistic shiver down my spine… until now. Continue reading »

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